Pseudoscience and Superstition: Things I Don't Believe In

At the borders of science lurks a range of ideas that are appealing, but
that have not been conscientiously worked over with a baloney detection kit: the notion,
say, that the Earth's surface is on the inside, not the outside, of a sphere; or claims
that you can levitate yourself by meditating and that ballet dancers and basketball
players routinely get up so high by levitating; or the proposition that I have something
called a soul, made not of matter or energy, but of something else for which there is no
other evidence, and which after my death might return to animate a cow or a worm.

Typical offerings of pseudoscience and superstition are:

acupuncture

alchemy

alien abductions

astrology

demons

dowsing

the Bermuda Triangle

biblical scientific foresight

"Big Foot" and the Loch Ness monster

ghosts

homeopathy

"lucky" numbers

extrasensory perception (ESP),
such as telepathy and "remote viewing" of distant places

creation science and theories such as
intelligent design

the belief that 13 is
an "unlucky" number (because of which many office buildings and hotels in
America pass directly from the 12th to the 14th floors -- why take chances?)

bleeding statues

crop circles

transcendental meditation feats

the conviction that carrying the severed foot of a rabbit around with you brings
good luck

the belief that razor blades stay sharper when kept inside small cardboard
pyramids, and other tenets of "pyramidology"

phone calls (none of them collect)
from the dead

the alleged discovery that untrained flatworms can learn a task by eating
the ground-up remains of other, better educated flatworms

"sensitives" who,
when carelessly blindfolded, read books with their fingertips

the prophecies of
Nostradamus

the notion that more crimes are committed when the Moon is
full

palmistry

tarot reading

numerology

"photography" of past events, such as the crucifixion of
Jesus

Edgar Cayce (who predicted that in the 1960s the "lost" continent of Atlantis
would "rise") and other "prophets," sleeping and awake

Ouija boards

water remembering what molecules used to be dissolved in
it

telling character from facial
features or bumps on the head

the "hundredth monkey" confusion and other claims
that whatever a small fraction of us wants to be true really is true

UFOs

dianetics and scientology

faith healers

haunted houses

magic waters

reincarnation

human beings spontaneously bursting into flame and being burned to a
crisp

perpetual motion machines, promising unlimited supplies of
energy

the systematically
inept predictions of Jeane Dixon (who "predicted" a 1953 Soviet invasion of Iran
and in 1965 that the USSR would beat the U.S. to put the first human on the Moon) and
other professional "psychics"

parapsychology

the Jehovah's Witnesses' prediction that the
world would end in 1917, and many similar prophecies

psychic spoon benders

Carlos
Castaneda and "sorcery"

Anatoly Kashpirovsky -- a faith healer who remotely
cures diseases ranging from hernias to AIDS by glaring at you out of your television

claims of finding the remains of Noah's Ark

accounts of a small brontosaurus crashing
through the rain forests of the Congo Republic in our time

Some claims are hard to test -- for example, if an expedition fails to find the ghost or
the brontosaurus, that doesn't mean it doesn't exist. Absence of evidence is not evidence
of absence. Others are easier -- for example, flatworm cannibalistic learning. A few --
for example, perpetual motion machines -- can be excluded on grounds of fundamental
physics.

The question, as always, is how good is the evidence? The burden of proof surely rests on
the shoulders of those who advance such claims. Some people hold that skepticism is a
liability, that true science is investigated without skepticism. They are perhaps halfway
there. But halfway doesn't do it.